The future of computing belongs to our children.

Long ago, before my time, there was a man who has been attributed to being the father of modern Turkey. So much so that his name was suffixed with the word Ataturk, meaning father of Turks if I remember correctly.

His name is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and apart from repelling an invasion under extreme duress he is largely responsible for the dismantling of the Ottoman empire and changing the Turkish language from Arabic script to Roman characters.

He did this out of a vision for a modern Turkey that is more along the lines of a Western culture and politic and is the reason Turkey is now a secular, democratic country. One thing he did stress, and in fact had a close involvement in, is that the future of his country rests in its children and that education is paramount.

History lesson aside :) What Mustafa believed was important for his country is also important for the future of computing. For anything really. As adults we have left our formative years and become set in our ways. Like jelly we have taken the form of the mould we were poured into by the education system and remain in that shape until eaten by the great flying spaghetti monster.

Fortunately for the world in general, children do not do, or believe in, everything their parents tell them and thus we have technological advancement. It is the education system which determines most how our children will go through their life and what they are exposed to then will influence all of their decisions.

Unfortunately the education system in many countries is severely underfunded and this means that needed learning tools are not as good as they should be. In order to make ends meet schools have no choice but to make decisions and cut more advanced teaching in order to at least give a basic tuition.

This not only hurts the children but also cripples that countries future. Especially if insufficiently or incorrectly educated people come into a position of power.

Usually due to budgetary shortcomings schools have to decide between computers or no computers for students. Or if they can afford computers, the question is how many. It seems to me that schools have now found a way to both supply and increase the amount of computers available to students.

I am hearing more and more of schools that have moved over to using Linux for their computers. In quite a few cases that I heard about they have been using them for years. When it comes down to a class of fifteen students, in order to stay within a budget, the choice of operating system would mean the difference between every student having a computer instead of some of them then I would choose Linux too.

Not only the schools are effected. Not everybody who goes to a school was born with a silver spoon in their mouth and if the curriculum requires the use of a computer outside of school hours then Linux can put computing hardware within reach of those who struggle to pay their monthly bills. In these cases, well loved equipment achieves a new lease of life with an operating system that efficiently uses the available resources.

Just about every decent job now, and in the future that I can see, requires computing experience. If only to type basic office stuff. If our children do not get that education on the very basics of computers then they are put at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives. I believe that it is our responsibility to have our children live better lives than we do.

So it is really a waste of time trying to convert the old, set and crusty generation that grew up without a choice. The children of today have a choice and they are making it. Our children are influencing the education system by demanding that a certain standard is achieved. They can see where the grown up world is heading and they want to learn the tools to live in it. It is our duty to make sure that our children are given the knowledge to make informed decisions about their future. Fortunately for them they have access to more information than we ever had when we were their age and our children are making use of that information. Perhaps more than what we are comfortable with.

Which is why I believe that the future of computing will be more open and freer than what we grew up with. The choice is not in our hands. It is in our children's and they, whether we like it or not, will drag us kicking and screaming into the future where we will fondly (foggily) remember the good old times.

4 Comments

Unfortunately, the decisions about computers and software are made by people that are too lazy or incapable of learning about new software developed by the opensource community. In some cases this is taking a very generous view of their abilities.

Even worse curriculum is written with learning outcomes that are only achievable with proprietary software.

Funding isn't made available to train teachers to use proprietary software, let alone opensource software, even if courses are available in the local area.

IMHO it will be the next generation (my grandchildren) who are more likely to adopt Linux as the preferred OS, because they will be raised by the generation who see everything online as free. They will only want devices with high speed Internet access and massive online storage so they always have access to their data.

I agree with what you say and it is these sort of uneducated people that are holding back our children. I also think that the children themselves, by the usage of new technology and the questions they ask also help in a small way to influence those decisions.

I agree with both of you. And is see (at the moment) one way to deal with these problems, which we already use in the Linux Community: -GET INVOLVED- .

We know that an open/free/libre world is raising stronger that ever, not only by the FLOSS community, but with the advent of network inter-connect ion & access, social web sites, p2p networks, and others, so they are in a better position (than we where) to achieve new "things" in the computational area. May be a lead will be necessarily, but only at the beginning.

I wish that when my kid goes to school (couple years from now) they will teach using proper OS - and hopefully instead of beeing teached how to use OS (Linux, Windows or whatever it be) the focus would be in learning to use *computers* (the difference beeing that knowing how to use computer, not an OS, gives better readiness to adopt other systems).

Chances however are that my kid well be taught to use "the proprietary OS I hate" but luckily in case of my own kid it is my possibility to make sure that he learns to use *nix systems *and* learns more about using computers in general than learning use just one specific OS and variant/distro of it. People like us who can teach this to our own children even if school does not is already in large numbers and I believe that in years to come the number will grow exponentially... And our children will be the next generation who will first infect their friends and in future their kids, our grandchilds, in turn.

The future of IT technology seems bright to me, even if nothing can be 100% guaranteed.

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